


In which Palpatine dies and it was definitely a disease and not anything else

by sunshineisdelicious



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:49:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29567070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshineisdelicious/pseuds/sunshineisdelicious
Summary: Warning: mentions of a coughing illness and lung damage. Palpatine is his Sithly self and also dies.
Kudos: 3





	In which Palpatine dies and it was definitely a disease and not anything else

One day, Chancellor Palpatine had a cough.   
  


It wasn’t too surprising. Even with the health care available to the wealthy on Coruscant, some viruses were persistent and very infectious. A check up with his private physician assured him that it would likely last a week or two and was cleared to work as long as he felt up to it. He informed his assistant, who informed the appropriate news agencies, who informed the masses about how inspiring it was that their chancellor served the Republic even when ill. 

Privately, Palpatine scoffed. He had been brutally trained and subjected to torture and then expected to perform at peak efficiency the next day, and what was a cough to that? Besides, using the Dark side of the Force often left a body (and thus the immune system) strained.  


It was an unfortunate truth that, though Sith rituals were often aimed at giving the user eternal health and life (at the expense of others, of course), there was simply no ritual or power for dealing with a cold once you had it. He would just have to ride it out.   


The cold progressed, as colds do. He had his office thoroughly sanitized after every meeting, though, just in case he were to catch something else. The fumes of the sprayed cleaning chemicals did tend to aggravate his cough, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.   


He also made sure to stay physically distant from the people he interacted with, which was truly a blessing. Such petty, small-minded, greedy little things they were. It was an exercise in self control every day to keep himself from poisoning annoying senators as they talked over tea or arranging an unfortunate speeder accident for them. It would be harder to work with new people, after all. 

  
One afternoon, he sat reviewing paperwork while the cleaning droid went about its work. The fumes were quite potent and he kept breathing them in and coughing. Fed up, he rose to leave the office for a few minutes—expect he fell to the ground in a dead faint. The cleaning droid shrieked and called for help, which came promptly in the form of a medical droid and later with an emergency crew.   
  


The guards of the Chancellor asked the inconsolable cleaning droid what had happened, who relayed that nothing had been out of the ordinary until the Chancellor had fainted. It wailed (as well as a droid can wail) that it had not cleaned enough, that surely he had caught another disease that had made his cold worse.   
  


The attention of the interviewers was quickly pulled to the group surrounding the Chancellor, frantically trying to treat what was now seen to be terrible lung damage. They rushed him out of the office to try to reach a medical facility, but it was too late to help.   
  


The Chancellor was pronounced dead that evening, to the shock of the entire Republic. His death was a tragedy, and everyone was urged to take proper precautions with their health involving infectious diseases.   
  


The mandatory autopsy, while not revealing any additional illness, confirmed that his extensive lung damage had been the cause of death. It was noted that the type of lung damage wasn’t entirely typical for the disease, but nothing too out of the ordinary.   
  


In the office of the late Chancellor Palpatine, the now quite calm cleaning droid disposed of its cleaning spray and clothes by incinerating them in the garbage disposal. It brought in nearly identical tools from another area of the building where they would not be noticed for a couple weeks. Satisfied that everything had been arranged as it wished, the droid then used the chaos of the re-election to slip away into the depths of Coruscant. It took with it only a small, mostly used envelope of iocaine powder (which, I might remind the reader, is among the deadlier poisons known to galaxy and will dissolve instantly in liquid).

**Author's Note:**

> This story would not let me sleep until I wrote it. I’m okay with that.


End file.
